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The Caremerge Solution Enables Compliance and Accountability with the Accountable Care Act

CHICAGO, Jan. 8, 2014 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ --
Caremerge, LLC announced today that it has launched its Care Coordination Platform with BMA Management, Ltd. - the largest provider of assisted living in Illinois and the 16th largest provider in the country. The Caremerge Solution facilitates in-depth care coordination for assisted living providers, enabling such organizations to be vigilant with the new standards of care identified by the Managed Care Organizations (MCO), as a result of the Accountable Care Act.

Until recently, Medicare and Medicaid paid a lump sum to senior living providers without accounting for the level of care or services provided. Under the Accountable Care Act, insurance companies, also known as MCOs (Managed Care Organizations), now mandate that senior living facilities, which include assisted living facilities, account for the quality of care they are providing a patient in order to get reimbursed accordingly. This care includes monitoring the patient's basic health points, to preventative measures like immunizations and regular condition specific exams. The new MCO standards mandate that senior living facilities must provide detailed data on a patient's care and wellness to get reimbursed appropriately. This new level of accountability suggests that those senior living providers who are not providing proactive care will fail based on the new compliance standards. It also suggests that the MCOs will save money in the long run due to better outcomes as a result of such proactive care measures.

"Our Care Coordination Platform solves three unique problems for senior care providers: It enables a higher level of care coordination by bringing all of the stakeholders together in one application so information is shared and patients have a higher quality of life; it takes the facility's costs down by reducing the amount of time and paperwork it takes to capture and share information; and finally, it also gives them an instant and easy solution to meeting the new MCO requirements (as a result of ACA) for proper reimbursements."

BMA Management, Ltd. has already rolled out the Caremerge solution to its 38 facilities within a month- another first in the industry.

"The Caremerge solution is very exciting to our organization," said Ruta Prasauskas from BMA Management, Ltd. "Like other providers, we have always been trying to find an EHR to fit into the Assisted Living workflows. Traditional Skilled Nursing EHRs are too complicated (due to code based reimbursements) and do not fit into our model easily. Caremerge's Care Coordination Platform is a perfect solution for the assisted living industry. It helps meet our needs today and is built for the future to share resident information with outside stakeholders, which will help in developing stronger partnerships with MCOs and ACOs. Additionally, the data we will now be able to capture and show to MCOs will take our standards of care to new levels across the board. This will also demonstrate that our services result in better outcomes and that we are a much cheaper alternative to higher acuity patients than a Skilled Nursing facility. Most importantly, this will allow us to provide a higher quality of life for our residents, and also allow us to scale our operations."

For more information on Caremerge, LLC and the Care Coordination Platform, please visit http://www.caremerge.com or contact Stacy Callahan at 917-972-1101, email: stacy@astonishmediagroup.com.

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